


Journalists and Engineers

by CenturyUnited



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, First Meetings, its like safety not guaranteed if any of you have seen that, time travel babey!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24159442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenturyUnited/pseuds/CenturyUnited
Summary: As an employee at Coal Hill Magazine, Clara heads out on an assignment with Danny and Adrian to locate and interview the unknown man who placed a classified ad in the newspaper seeking a companion for time travel.
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 28
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is already completed, so I'll probably just post the chapters once every few days until they're all up. Also, this is hugely based on Safety Not Guaranteed, which is a very cool movie that I would highly recommend watching. (After reading, of course).
> 
> Let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome, really.

“How far back do you want me to go? Uni? Oh, I was totally outgoing—a _real_ people person. In secondary school, I felt like that mouse that gets dropped into a snake cage and just kind of sits there, frozen, trying to blend in. I guess I can remember being happy when I was a kid, back when you just naturally expected good things to happen. Back before my mum died. Now, I just expect the worst and try not to get my hopes up. Which is why I’m here. Does that answer the question?”

The man sitting across from Clara looked at her with nothing but apathy. “Er. Usually, people just say where they’re from, where they went to school, and where they worked before.”

“Great! I’m already overqualified.” She laughed awkwardly, trying to lighten the mood with her awfully miscalculated joke.

“Oh, I get it. You think you’re too good for this.”

“No! No, I’m sorry. I really need the money. I mouth off when I’m nervous, and I’ve got a mouth on me. Seriously, it’s got a mind of it’s own. I’m worried it wants to go solo.”

“Yeah, it’s not going to work out here. I know your type. You’re just not a quality hire.” He gave her a falsely pitying look and limply shook her hand.

Clara sighed as she walked out the door. She was now zero for four as far as job interviews went, which was altogether too bloody bad considering her present situation.

She’d graduated with a degree in English almost five years ago, and somehow, she had yet to find a better job than her current shite position at Coal Hill Magazine. When she’d first landed there, she’d been confident that it would be a fantastic start to a great career. After all, the magazine lauded itself as a publication dedicated mostly to arts and literature (which she’d quickly learned was not as true now as it had been thirty years ago).

She’d been spectacularly wrong on all counts.

She’d spent her entire first year fetching coffee (even though she was _not_ the fetching sort), buying toilet paper for the office, and pitching original ideas that were instantly shot down at team meetings. It hadn’t gotten particularly better from there.

Now, as she walked back into the sleek, modern office that she’d been working in for years—keeping her head down so that her nightmare of a boss _Missy_ wouldn’t call her over and ask her to do something daft and annoying—she promised herself that she’d get away from this pretty prison. She’d find some place else. A place where the people weren’t so cold and calculating. A place where she felt less like an unwilling participant in the dreadful, mandatory rat-race that her life had become. A place where she might finally regain control of her own damn destiny.

She hadn’t realized she’d zoned out for so long until she glanced at the time on her computer. 11:28am. She had a meeting in two minutes that she frankly couldn’t be arsed to care about, but she knew that she’d go anyway.

Huffing out a sigh of soul-crushing resignation, Clara gathered her notebook and pushed away from her cubicle desk to make her way up one floor to the conference room with the bright, airy windows and the potted plants and the soulless people who thought about nothing but money and who didn’t care about the power of words. She sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows on the outskirts of the room, not bothering to take a seat at the table, in an attempt to feel the light of the autumn sun heat the back of her neck. It would give her something to focus on during what she was certain would only be another horrible meeting.

Missy stood at the head of the table and asked for ideas for a story. Almost everyone performed their braindead duty of sitting there in awkward silence until Missy gave the room-at-large one of her many murderous expressions, at which point a brave few proposed ideas so shockingly boring that Clara wondered just how little Missy had to care to let these people keep their miserable jobs.

Then Danny spoke (the only person she found even remotely likable in this hellhole), and Clara found herself intrigued in a team meeting for the first time in years. Maybe ever.

“What about this time travel ad?”

Missy gestured for him to keep going.

“Someone emailed this in from the classifieds. Some bloke is looking for someone to go back in time with him.”

Clara glanced up at the TV screen, where Danny was projecting a picture of a newspaper clipping that read:

_WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 12, Hastings TN34, United Kingdom. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own screwdriver. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before._

She tried to focus back on what Danny was saying. “—do a little tongue-in-cheek investigation. Find this man, see if he thinks it’s real. You know, see if he really believes this stuff. I think it could be funny.”

Missy stood silently for a second, but there was an evil sort of glee that lit up her face at the thought of humiliating someone so publicly for something so bizarre. “Alright. You got it.”

“Can I get some people to help?” Danny asked.

For some reason she couldn’t explain, Clara felt that it was absolutely necessary for her to be a part of this project. She was entirely against the idea of showing up on some strange man’s doorstep and tearing into him for being quirky, but she was genuinely intrigued by the ad. Plus, she knew that it would be the most interesting story she will have gotten the opportunity to write in the last four and a half years.

She threw her hand up in the air. “I’ll do it!”

“Me too, please.” The shy new-guy that always sat next to her during these meetings volunteered himself with an awkward smile. Clara thought that his name might be Adrian and felt instantly guilty for not having bothered to remember.

Missy nodded at Danny. “Alright, you can take Claire and pretty-boy here with you. This better be good. And if it’s not, I’ll just have to fire all three of you!”

Clara watched as Missy shook with genuine laughter, thinking about how it was that she had ended up in this hellhole, and wondered whether or not it was possible to silence someone permanently with only her mind. Missy kept on laughing and throwing frankly disturbing winks in Danny’s direction.

Guess not, then.

\---

Right before they all left for the day, Danny called for a meeting. “Alright you two, where are we at so far?”

“We sent a letter to the address in the ad, and asked for them to get back to us,” Adrian stated with a sense of pride, sitting up straight as an arrow in the small desk chair while resting his hands on his laptop’s keyboard as it sat on his legs.

“Yeah, and I called the local paper, but they’re really uptight about giving out information on people who take out ads.” Clara wondered what it said about her that she spoke as if she worked entirely alone while Adrian and Danny spoke as if they were part of some cohesive team that did stuff as ‘we’ and ‘us’ and not as ‘I’ and ‘me’.

Danny nodded and mentioned something about having spent the best summer of his life in Hastings, but Clara wasn’t really listening. Maybe she was an egomaniac. Maybe she just didn’t care.

“Alright then, we should leave tomorrow. We’ll go to Hastings, we can find whoever put up the ad, and then we can stake him out. Get a feel for the guy, see what people think of him.” Danny nodded to himself as he spoke.

In that moment, Clara remembered that Danny used to be an army man. Stake outs and tactical teams and whatever else was involved in soldiering. Maybe this trip would turn out to be like some undercover operation to find, capture, and interrogate some bloke while they all wore uniforms and yelled ‘yes, sir’ and paraded around with authority.

She shook herself and tried to pinpoint where exactly in her mind that thought had come from. She didn’t really like soldiers. She would have hated taking orders.

\---

“I’m going out of town for a few days.” Clara told her dad between bites of Chinese takeaway.

“ _Out_ out?” She hated that her dad sounded so cautiously optimistic about the idea of her ‘going out’.

“It’s a work thing,” she mumbled.

“Well I think it’d be great if you went out. Do some social stuff with your friends. Get out of your funk.”

Clara flinched. “I don’t have a funk. I’m perfectly funkless, actually.”

“Well. You’re sad. I don’t know, sweetheart, it’s like there’s a cloud following you around.” He gestured around her general outline with his chopsticks. “You’re antisocial.”

Clara didn’t bother trying to respond and finished her food in silence, regretting having chosen to visit her dad in this new house that he shared with his new wife where she felt judged and unheard and alone.

_The greatest risk is not taking one._

She read her fortune on the tiny slip of paper and wondered if it was possible to eject from her own life and land in someone else’s.

\---

The next morning, she sat next to Adrian on a bench outside of the office, where they both waited for Danny to pick them up in the only company vehicle that the magazine had ever owned.

She turned towards this young guy with his neatly combed hair and his tiny bowtie and his classically sculpted features and wondered why he was working with them in the first place.

“What time would you go back to? If you could.”

Adrian turned to look at her, slightly startled, before responding. “I don’t know. I’m quite fine here.”

Clara found herself unspeakably disappointed by that answer. “I would definitely go back. Everything cool is gone. The Aztecs, people killing themselves for each other, Victorian dresses.” In her mind, she silently listed her mum.

Adrian just looked slightly confused and didn’t respond.

“You _seriously_ wouldn’t want to go back to see the dragons and the elves fighting each other in the magical forests of New Zealand? Come on.”

He looked sad for a second and awkwardly placed his hand on Clara’s shoulder. “No. That wasn’t a time.”

She realized that he probably pitied her for some reason. “Yeah, okay.”

They sat in silence after that, but Danny showed up no more than two minutes later. With a friendly smile, he ordered them to get in the car, and she realized right then that she wasn’t any more likely to enjoy following orders if they were delivered with a good attitude. In fact, she suspected that she liked those orders even less than the normal ones. At least with the normal ones, there was no pretense.

They spent the majority of the trip in silence, and Clara watched green, rolling hills fly past them as they made their way to the southeast coast of England.

At one point, Danny started talking about their strategy for acquiring the necessary information for their article, speaking to the two other people in the car like they were part of some squadron headed into a dangerous situation.

Clara wondered how long she would last before she stopped listening to his commands completely and just went rogue. She gave it a day.

\---

They arrived in Hastings at about 9am, and Danny retrieved the keys for the shitty hotel room that the three of them would be sharing. The magazine had allotted them enough money for two rooms, but Adrian and Danny thought it would be a good idea to save the extra money and use it on food. Clara didn’t particularly care either way, so she had agreed.

The three of them had just placed all of their belongings in their room when Danny suggested that she and Adrian should stake out the post office in the ad’s address in case their wanted man checked his mail everyday. He said he’d be scoping out some other leads on the other side of town, so Clara agreed.

She sat with Adrian in the company vehicle across the street from the post office for a good hour before Adrian decided that he needed some air. Right in front of their car, he plopped down on the sidewalk and pulled out his laptop to do whatever it was that he spent all day doing.

Clara shrugged and joined him on the pavement, and they sat together in the chilly fall air, enjoying a moment of sun.

A few minutes later, a gangly man with wild brown hair and a brown pin-stripe suit walked into the post office, and Clara hit Adrian’s shoulder. “Oi, here we go.”

Adrian glanced up and shook his head. “Him? No way. He’s too normal to be time traveling.”

“Come on, he’s the time traveling demo. The excited puppy-dog thing, the trainers, even the strange suit.”

The man then opened P.O. Box 10, and Clara sighed.

Twenty minutes after that, a bloke with a leather jacket and big, floppy ears opened the door to the post office, and Adrian nudged her with his elbow. “Oh, what about this one?”

“Yeah, he probably wants to stop whoever gave him that haircut from being born.”

This man opened P.O. Box 9, and Clara flopped back onto the pavement, sighing at the fact that this exercise was pointless.

People stopped coming to the post office for a while, with the exception of a silly man who eerily resembled Adrian, so Clara got back in the car and rested with her head leaning against the driver's side door.

Time passed slowly as she felt the sun’s rays hit her forehead and her cheekbones. She briefly thought about what she would be doing if she were back in London and decided that she much preferred pretending to be a good stake-out operative than pretending that she liked her job.

At around noon, she watched as a shitty, blue muscle car pulled up in front of the post office and a man dressed like he was a strange cross between a homeless vagrant and an edgy magician walked through the office doors.

With bated breath, she took him in from head to toe as he dug around in his pockets for the key to his box. He was older, probably mid-fifties, and had a head full of untamed gray curls. He wore beige-black tartan trousers and a peacoat on top of a zip-up hoodie over a graphic t-shirt that was _so_ worn that it actually had holes along its bottom and its loosened collar. He wore sunglasses.

She watched him carefully glance from left to right before sticking his key into his box and taking out his mail.

P.O. Box 12. This was their man.

Coming fully awake, Clara hissed out the window at Adrian. “Oi! It’s him. It’s the guy.”

Adrian looked up from his laptop. “Him? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Box 12. Get in the car!”

The man then exited the post office and approached his own vehicle, and Clara knew that she was going to have to leave Adrian behind.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Adrian stood on the sidewalk next to his laptop, awkwardly waving his hands at her.

“Following him!” A frisson of unfamiliar eagerness shot down her spine as the man started his car.

“What about Danny? You should call him!”

A split second later, the old blue car started making its way down the street, and Clara took off after it, feeling a sense of excitement and control that she hadn’t felt in a really, really long time.


	2. Chapter 2

Clara followed the blue car for about fifteen minutes before it pulled off into a parking lot in front of what looked like some sort of industrial complex.

She parked the company car one street over, behind some trees, and crept about as close as she could get to the man without being spotted.

He got out of his car and pulled a large pair of binoculars out of his coat pocket, which momentarily stunned Clara because she could have sworn that those pockets wouldn’t have held anything much larger than her cellphone. Her mind flickered through all the possible reasons why someone would keep a pair of binoculars in their pocket in the first place before she forced herself to refocus on the matter at hand. Stake-out operation. Potential madman. Perhaps time travel.

The man pointed his binoculars towards the building marked “Karabraxos Laser Technologies” and muttered things to himself under his breath. He carefully watched people come and go and constantly checked the time on his wristwatch, and Clara thought that it almost looked like he was casing the place out.

She watched him inspect the building like this for a few hours before she had to clumsily trip over herself in a race to get back to the company car so that she could continue following him as he climbed back into his own vehicle and ignited its engine.

Unbeknownst to him, he ended up leading her to some local Tesco. She sat in the parking lot for about forty-five minutes, watching his car and waiting for him to come back out, before she decided to ditch the waiting and walk inside to find out what was taking so long.

As she awkwardly wandered in, trying to remember how she normally behaved when she walked into her own local supermarket, she was stopped in her tracks by the sight of this man in a work uniform. For some reason, it looked so incredibly wrong on him. He was altogether too weird and too interesting to be comfortably and properly contained in some mass-produced Tesco uniform.

She shook her head and carefully edged closer so that she could hear him speaking to a young, attentive fellow employee with big hair and brightly-colored shoes.

“It’s pretty amazing stuff. I’ll teach you all about Schrödinger’s whole cat-in-the-box theory later. It’ll turn your brain to pudding.”

He was Scottish. She could hear it in the lilt of his voice.

“It’s like I’m the only one who really gets it, you know. I started a discussion with this dimwitted, big-shot theoretical physicist online, and I asked him: ‘Do the rules of quantum mechanics allow for alternate histories?’ And he just got angry at me.” The man shelved a bag of crisps with evident frustration and turned to look at his shorter coworker. “People are so _convinced_ that it’s a fixed thing, but they’re all just looking at this _little_ sliver of time. That’s all people can see. But it’s _not_ a fixed thing, Bill. It’s on and on, in both directions, like a big loop.”

Bill, as she’d just learned, nodded with a smile before she gave him a shrug. “You’ll have to tell me about it later, mate. I’ve got to do an inventory check.”

Clara watched Bill walk off as the man continued shelving crisps. Before anyone noticed that she’d just been standing there blatantly staring at him from a distance, she looked away and wandered up to an empty check-out lane to get some information from the manager that was posted there.

She cleared her throat. “I’d like to fill out a comment card on one of your employees. The tall guy with the gray hair? What’s his name?”

The blonde woman looked up at her with an apologetic grimace on her face. “Sorry, miss. He’s a little…” She twirled her finger by her temple, indicating that she clearly thought he was mad.

“No, no! It’s a good comment. Like a compliment.” She gave the woman an awkward thumbs up, to which she responded with a look of surprise.

“Oh! That’s good. Well, his name is Basil, if you can believe it. Basil Smith.”

Clara turned to look at Basil, matching his peculiar name to his peculiar nature, before she looked back at the woman who gave her the name. “Thank you.”

She pulled away from the Tesco and thought about how long it had been since she’d tasted basil. She thought that maybe it had been placed on a posh pizza at some fancy office party last year, but she never ate at those functions. Usually, she just stood along the peripheries and nodded and faked a smile, urging herself to run away and see those 101 places that her mum would have liked to see. She never ran, but she thought that maybe someone like Basil might.

Then, she found herself wondering if Basil himself liked basil or if he hated it because it was his name. She should have known that his name would be just as distinctive as his whole personality.

Smith didn’t suit him. But Basil did.

\---

Clara met up with Adrian and Danny at a local pub to buy cheap food with the magazine’s money and talk about the information she’d managed to gather.

Danny had been leaning into Adrian as they both looked at his laptop screen when she walked in and joined them at their table.

“There she is. You went rogue on us. What did you get?” Danny smiled brightly at her, and for some reason, Clara didn’t like it. Maybe it was the fact that he felt he was in a position to call her ‘rogue’.

She thought about everything that she’d observed that day. Basil’s strange stake-out of the local scientific manufacturing company, his unusual tendencies, his odd but kind interactions with his much younger coworker, his seemingly strong grasp on physics, and the fact that his manager thought he was barmy. She chose to share the bare basics.

“I got his name and found out where he works.”

Danny nodded and authoritatively tapped their table top. “Alright. Adrian will probably be able to find his address using that intel. Tomorrow morning, I’ll go undercover to his house. I’ll answer his ad and find out just how mental this guy is.”

Clara vaguely nodded and ate bland chips while her mind pictured Danny rolling about on the ground, wearing a bright orange life jacket (because she couldn’t imagine what a real soldier’s vest looked like), armed with nothing but big squirt guns.

She then thought about how offended he might be if he could see into her mind. Probably very. He was a _good_ soldier, and even though she didn’t really know what that meant, she was fairly certain that it didn’t involve squirt guns. Or life vests, for that matter.

As Danny and Adrian talked about working at the magazine, she found herself questioning if Basil had fantastical day dreams, too. Then, she wondered what era he wanted to go back to with his time-traveling quantum mechanics. Maybe he wanted to see the dinosaurs.

\---

The next morning, the three of them piled into the company car, and Clara gave directions using the address that Adrian had been able to retrieve for them and her phone’s GPS. After a relatively short drive to the very outskirts of town, they pulled into a side road next to an isolated house.

The property was relatively large, but it was hugely overgrown. The house seemed old and very poorly taken care of—dirty windows, patched up roof that was covered in moss, rotting wood along the porch, chipped and worn paint, and grass that must have gone up to Clara’s calves. The attached shed seemed to be in slightly better shape, with newer wood and a shiny padlock and a cleared roof, but it was still covered in vines. Overall, the plants and the moss and the water of the surrounding forest seemed to have consumed the house, making it a part of the larger ecosystem.

Evidently, Basil didn’t really have neighbors to complain about the state of the place. His house was surrounded on all sides by trees.

Clara looked down at her phone’s screen. “Yep. This is definitely the address.”

Danny looked from Clara, to the house, and back to Clara before he responded. “This place is a rubbish tip.” He cleared his throat and straightened his shirt. “Alright, I’m going in.”

She turned to him. “Can I go in with you?”

“No. You did well yesterday, but I’m going to handle this on my own. I don’t want to overwhelm this guy.”

Clara bristled at the idea that she was about to do as he said, but based on what she’d seen the day before, she had to agree that Basil seemed like he’d be alarmed by too many strangers. She sighed and slumped back into her seat as Danny got out of the driver’s side to approach the house.

She watched Danny trek through the grass in his fancy jeans and crisp, pink button-up shirt, and thought about the fact that he so clearly didn’t belong there. He stood out like a sore-thumb, this soldier with his perfect posture and precise haircut and clean clothes. In her mind’s eye, she pictured a wild mane of gray hair and a worn-out t-shirt, and she knew instantly that Basil would turn her coworker away.

She crept out of the car in hopes of overhearing their conversation just as Danny was primly rapping his knuckles on the house’s wooden door. A moment later, she saw Basil appear from the side of the house. He was carrying a box full of funnels and hoses and metal joints and gears, and Clara watched as he turned to look at the man on his porch with an owlish scowl. Basil loudly dropped the box to the ground to get Danny’s attention.

Danny turned without flinching. “Basil. Basil Smith, am I right?”

Basil said nothing. He only frowned harder at Danny’s use of his name.

“My name is Danny. I saw your ad in the classifieds, and I wanted to know if you still needed a partner.”

The older man scanned him with his eyes from head to toe. “Why?”

Danny looked confused for a moment. “You mean why I want to go back? It’s an amazing opportunity. See the gladiators, fight with the spartans, meet your parents when they were young. It’d be fun. I mean who wouldn’t want to go back? _You_ want to go back. Why do _you_ want to go back?”

Basil ignored the question, looking at the man standing on his porch like he was entirely unimpressed with his words and his postulated superiority.

Danny spoke frankly in response. “Look, do you need a partner or not?”

Clara missed the rest of their conversation, as Basil had taken a step closer to Danny and had spoken too quietly for her to hear at a distance, but clearly he’d concluded that Danny wasn’t the time traveling sort because he’d just shooed her coworker from his porch and away from his house.

Danny trudged back to their car frowning, and Clara climbed back into the passenger seat.

Adrian looked excitedly towards their ‘team leader’. “So? What did he say?”

Danny turned towards the both of them. “Well, he’s the real deal. He didn’t put that ad in the paper as a prank.” He continued frowning as he shook his head. “He’s not exactly stupid, but there’s definitely something wrong with him. Didn’t like my sorry arse at all.”

Clara looked back towards the house in curiosity. Perhaps Basil didn’t like soldiers either. Perhaps he just didn’t like Danny. Perhaps it was even both.

“So what? That’s it?” asked Adrian.

“Oh no. This just got interesting.” Danny pulled away from the house and drove them into town to get lunch.

\---

Clara placed another greasy chip into her mouth as she looked up at Danny. “What makes you think that he won’t slam the door in my face, too?”

“Because you have to be sincere and charming. He’s probably used to all sorts of tossers coming along to make fun of him.”

Adrian then awkwardly spoke up. “And because probably none of the other people were beautiful women.” He coughed a little and instantly looked back down at his plate.

“Easy there, mate.” Danny patted Adrian on the shoulder before turning to look back at Clara. “But he’s probably right. You can use that, too.” She tried not to be irritated by that. “There’s something off about this guy. You’re going to have to go slow, like you’re trapping a skittish animal. You know. Lure him, play coy. Woman stuff.”

She wanted to slap Danny quite hard right in that instant, and she felt her stomach drop at the idea of leading some guy on just to end up tearing him down all for some shitty magazine article that absolutely no one would ever bother to read. Nevertheless, she wanted to interact with Basil, so she would do this thing. She’d just do it however _she_ wanted. Screw Danny’s stupid ‘orders’.

They’d piled into the company car after they’d eaten lunch, and Danny drove them to the nearby Tesco where Basil worked. Clara walked into the supermarket on her own, trying to not think too much about her limbs and how to move them as inconspicuously as possible, and wandered the aisles until she turned the corner and spotted Basil shelving some biscuits by himself.

Carefully, she wandered down the aisle towards him, pretending that she was inspecting the different varieties of jammie dodgers, and shoved a random box into her purse. As she edged closer and closer, she saw him pause in his work, barely turning his head to look at her out of the corner of his eye. She quickly took the last few steps separating them and leaned her back against the shelf to face him.

“Do you sell screwdrivers here?” Clara tried her best to sound as cool and in-control as possible. Like she knew exactly what she was doing.

His blue-green eyes flicked from left to right before meeting her own. “What kind of screwdrivers?”

“I don’t know. Something sexy and affordable with… screwing power.” She realized right then that she knew absolutely nothing about tools, and she tried her very best to keep herself from blushing. He didn’t seem to notice.

“You should try Osgood’s Tools. Shop is near the pier. Tesco isn’t the right place to find worthy screwdrivers.”

“Hmm. What about those thingies, those wrench things that have rotating head-bits that click and stuff. You know, those things. Do you have those?” She internally cringed at the fact that she had an English degree.

Basil stopped restocking the shelves, still holding a box of jaffa cakes in his hands, and gave her his full attention. “What exactly is the intended use here? Is there a leaky faucet or something?”

“Well if your ad had been written properly, I may have a better idea of what I need.”

He stared at her for an awkward second of shock before he spoke with a noticeable degree of suspicion. “My ad?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty sloppy.”

He frowned magnificently and instantly at that. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. I hope you worked harder on your calibrations.”

Basil reeled back in evident offense, craned his head from left to right as if to make sure they were alone, and leaned in before practically hissing. “My calibrations are absolutely pin-point. Certifiably perfect.”

Clara really, _really_ wanted to laugh at his scandalized facial expression, but she kept it in check.

He leaned in further. “There are people after me. How do I know you don’t work for them?”

She shrugged as casually as she could. “Because I’ve never worked for anyone in my life. I don’t really follow orders very well.”

“Ever face certain death?”

“If it was so certain, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” She maintained eye contact with him as she took the box of jaffa cakes out of his hands and placed it on the shelf behind her without looking. It was a weak attempt at a weird power move, but it seemed to have its desired effect.

He looked around them again. “This is a bad place to talk. I get off in about fifteen. Meet me then.”

“See you in eight.” She wanted to seem like she was in control of this absolutely bananas situation, and a response like that one let her pretend.

As she was walking away, she threw the box of jammie dodgers that had been sitting in her purse towards him. He turned and caught it with a look of surprise. She’d written her phone number on it as she’d been walking.

She then rushed back out to the parking lot and jumped back into the company car, pushing Danny out of the driver’s seat and taking his place. “Get down!”

Adrian instantly ducked in the back seat, and Danny turned to look at her. “What’s going on? What the hell is he doing?”

“I don’t know. He’s all freaked out. He thinks people are following him. We’re going to meet. He’s leading us to a secure location.”

A few minutes later, Basil’s blue car drove just past her own and paused, waiting for her to pull out of her current parking spot. Clara took a split second to consider how absolutely mad it was that she’d just pulled off the most unusual meeting in her life before she put the car in drive and stepped on the gas.

As Clara drove, carefully following Basil’s lead, Danny spoke. “If this guy’s taking you to some sex bunker or something, he’s going to be _really_ freaked out when he sees me and Adrian get out of this car.”

She didn’t bother responding to Danny’s comment as she turned into a small, unpaved lane between buildings, following Basil’s taillights. Her heart was beating loudly and rapidly in her chest, her fingers tingled with a sense of action and excitement, and her mind was shooting off in all sorts of directions.

Basil was an absolute stranger, and a very strange one at that. None of them had any real idea where they were going or what he was going to do once they got there, but something inside of Clara felt an instinctive trust for this man. Or maybe she just wanted adventure. In that moment, the distinction didn’t really matter.

When she saw Basil pull into a small lot and get out of his car to approach her own, she smacked Danny’s back and began to panic at the idea of being found out. “Get down. Get down! Oh my god, he’s coming over here.”

Danny bent over so that his chest pressed against his knees. “Don’t let him see me. It’ll blow everything!”

“Well what the bloody hell am I supposed to do then?”

“ _I_ don’t know!”

Clara whipped her head around in hopes that she’d see something that would inspire her to act. Spotting a set of headlights coming down the lane as she glanced at the rearview mirror, a questionable idea popped into her head. Before she had a chance to think any more about it, she rolled her window down and threw the car into drive, allowing it to continue moving forward.

As she drove by Basil, she leaned her head out of the open window. “Er. We’re being followed! Go. Get in your car! Go!”

As he registered her words, he rapidly turned his head to look at the approaching headlights and frantically dove back into his car. A small wave of relief washed over her.

Feeling an urge to laugh at the frankly ridiculous stunt she’d just pulled to get them out of a close call, Clara drove down a few blocks before she stopped and turned to look at both of her coworkers. “Just get out. He’s going to see you two otherwise.”

“But where are we?” asked Adrian, sounding a bit afraid.

Clara looked around and shrugged. “I don’t know. Just get out. I’ll come to get you when I’m done.”

“Yeah, I don’t think—” Danny was cut off by Clara’s ringtone.

She quickly pulled her phone out of her purse, looked at its screen, and saw an unfamiliar number. She knew that there was really only one person it could be, so she instantly picked up.

“Hello?”

“I’m too exposed here right now, I can’t talk. Look, my gut tells me that you’re not with the pudding brains, but I have to be absolutely certain. I’m going to do a background check on you. If everything looks good, I’ll be in touch.”

Clara thought for a moment about the fact that Basil didn’t actually know her name, and how completely fruitless it would be to do any research on her without it. “Er. Yeah. Okay.”

“Right. Over and ou–” He cut himself off. “–Er, goodnight.”

Before she’d gotten a chance to reply, Basil had hung up.


	3. Chapter 3

The next day, Clara received a text with instructions to meet Basil on the bleachers at a local secondary school's football match. She'd thought that the choice of venue was a bit odd, but she'd told Danny and Adrian about it anyway, and they'd decided that they'd follow along to watch her from a distance.

When the three of them arrived at the football field, Clara told her coworkers to wait by the entrance for a few minutes so that they wouldn't be spotted walking in together. She wandered in without really waiting for their response.

Looking around her, she saw basically what she expected to see: local mums and dads, grandparents, and students all watching some young boys kick a football around. Taking it all in—the cheering and the waving and the school colors—she realized just how little she could relate to these people.

She hadn't done this whole thing when she was in secondary school. She'd never been able to relate to the people who cared so much about something as frivolous as football. Not when she'd been failing at coping with the death of her mum. Not when she'd been developing a passionate disdain for everything in life that was out of her control and a fervent distaste for the people who didn't realize just how precious life was or how crushingly empty it could feel.

"Psst. _Pssssst_."

Clara was yanked away from her thoughts by none other than the strange man who had unknowingly turned her dismally boring life into something so much more interesting. She met his blue eyes and nodded in acknowledgement as she climbed a few steps to sit next to him on the bleachers.

He didn't even greet her before he started talking. "I would apologize for the noise level here, but we need to maintain cover, and I'm positive that I'm being followed."

"Who are we dealing with here?" Clara had decided that she'd just go with it.

"I'm not certain. Probably the government." He smirked. "But the joke's on them. The technology I've invented can't be understood by your average pudding brain."

She chuckled at his smug expression. "So what are our means of transportation, then?"

"Oi. Hold on a minute, alright? I'm still making up my mind about you as a companion. I have to be certain that I trust you before I clue you in on certain–" He waved his hands about. "–Classified information."

"Alright, then. What year are we going back to?"

Clara took a moment to consider everything that she'd thought she would hear from this strange mystery of a man. She had imagined him saying something along the lines of wanting to go back for the invention of the submarine or the first ever flight into space or even the dawn of time. She was shocked to hear what he said instead.

"We're going back to 2002."

What in the world was even remotely cool or interesting about 2002? She'd only been a kid then, but she couldn't remember anything interesting happening that year.

He spoke again. "Is that going to work for you?"

Clara considered that the only real reason she would ever want to time travel would be to see her mum again. To stop her from dying. She'd been living in blissful ignorance back in 2002. "Yeah. That's perfect."

They made eye contact then, and Clara felt something strange run through her. A sensation she hadn't felt in ages—something dangerously close to understanding and connection. It felt as if he'd been able to hear some deeper, sadder truth in her three-word response.

Then, his eyes drifted to something behind her, and she watched him stiffen. "I recognize that man. He showed up at my house."

She turned and realized in a panic that he was referring to Danny. She tried to turn his attention towards something else before he focused too much on her coworker. She improvised. "Er, I think that bloke a few seats back is recording our conversation. Is there somewhere else we could go?"

Without hesitating, he grabbed her hand and pulled her out of her seat, rushing them towards the exit. He only stopped running when they'd reached a spot behind some dumpsters.

"Alright. I think you're ready for the next step. Some basic training. Screwdriver skills. That kind of thing." He was looking right at her with an intensity that she wasn't totally sure was warranted.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yes. I just realized I don't know your name." A crease appeared between his fierce eyebrows as he frowned at his own glaring oversight.

She couldn't help the ever-so-slight upturning of her lips. "I'm Clara. Clara Oswald."

"Well then, Clara Oswald, that's all for today. I'll see you when I see you." With that, he ran off towards his shitty blue car.

There was something suspiciously close to happiness buzzing underneath her skin when she watched his curls bounce on his head as he ran like a penguin through the car park. He had such an exceptional capacity for curiosity and suspicion and weird humor. He was so wholly unapologetic about the way that he spoke, behaved, and dressed, and something in her found it irresistibly refreshing.

He wasn't part of any mandatory, soul-crushing rat-race, and he wasn't hollow and cold like those people that surrounded her back in London. He did whatever he did because he wanted to do it and because he was passionate about it. It made him glow brightly and pulse intensely with signs of vibrant, eccentric life.

He even made her want to believe in something as absurd and impossible as time travel.

For what felt like the first time in years, Clara's face gave way to a very small, but genuine smile.

\---

Early the next morning, Clara stood on the street outside of her shite hotel, holding two travel cups full of tea, and waited for Basil to meet her as per his instructions. He appeared in his car at exactly 9:05am and did nothing but unlock his doors when he pulled up to the sidewalk—like he was expecting her to know exactly what to do once he'd shown up.

She tilted her head as he stared at her from the driver's seat, and he rolled down the window to say only: "Come on, come on, _come on_ ," like an impatient, overexcited boy.

She wanted to both roll her eyes and laugh at his antics, but she just got in the car and handed him the extra cuppa. She'd been sleepily sipping at her own milkless, sugarless tea while watching the shops start to open for the day out of the passenger side window when she was rudely startled by the sound of him spitting something out all over his windshield.

When she turned towards him, she found him looking at her with an owlish scowl.

"What is _this_?" He waved his travel cup around.

"Er. Tea."

"No. This is grassy pond water." He'd gestured towards his glove compartment and handed her his cup. "There's sugar in there. Add some in here."

Warily, she opened his glove compartment and found an array of truly strange things piled up inside. For one, he really _did_ have a plastic bag filled to the brim with nothing but granulated sugar, which made absolutely no sense. On top of that, she found some stale jelly babies, a beat-up bright-yellow yoyo, at least four watches that didn't tell the correct time, one watch that _did_ tell the correct time, guitar picks, a spoon, and an assortment of springs and gears. Not a single item felt even fractionally normal.

Using the questionable spoon, Clara added some sugar to his tea and then handed it back to him. He sipped it, grimaced, and handed it back.

They repeated this little dance until Clara had added something like seven whole spoonfuls of sugar to his drink, which was both disgusting and disturbing. Nevertheless, Basil finished his upgraded sugar-water with delight, and looked at her like he was proud for having just taught her the only decent way to consume tea.

She wondered why she didn't find his peculiar brand of bravado and confidence aggravating. Why, instead, it made her feel like she wasn't alone for the first time since her mum died.

She was relieved that he hadn't asked for milk.

\---

Taking in all of the tools littered around the well-loved workbench, the messy diagrams covered in circles and numbers pinned up on every available centimeter of wall-space, and the absolute mess of wires and gears and bolts scattered about in boxes and in old tea cups all over his living room, Clara tried to imagine a world in which Basil was nothing but a Tesco employee.

She couldn't do it. Not when she was surrounded by his now-evident imagination, penchant for creating things, and borderline obsessive passion for science.

"What is all of this stuff?" She gestured at the diagrams and sketches on the walls.

"It's part of the plan. Mostly just calculations. Quantum physics and cats and paradoxes. Space-time."

She ignored the bit about cats. "Why are there so many circles?"

He looked down at her with something like confusion. "Understanding time means understanding circles. I think." He turned towards his wall and frowned. "Sometimes, I'm not totally sure that it all doesn't just revolve around Tuesdays."

Clara wanted to understand what in the world that could ever mean, but she was too busy being thrilled about the fact that she was feeling truly, genuinely curious and excited about _doing_ something—learning, seeing, preparing gross tea.

After grabbing a screwdriver from his desk, Basil guided her outside through his creaky backdoor. She'd been busy staring at a rusted robot dog-thing sitting on the ground when, without any explanation or preamble, Basil told her to chase him through the trails in the forest surrounding his house.

He took off running—fully dressed in his brogue boots, black tartan trousers, and red-lined coat—and Clara stared at him in bewilderment, not entirely certain of what to do.

As he reached the edge of his yard, straddling the border of the vast forest and inviting her to dive into his absurd universe, he turned and yelled: "Time travel isn't about fighting people, Clara! It's about _running!_ "

He shot her a mad smile and continued on his merry way without a care in the world for what he looked like or sounded like (which was ridiculous on both counts).

Her eyes crinkled in mirth as she smiled wide, which felt unfamiliar but entirely welcome, and she took off after him.

\---

Letting out a shaky breath, nervous and frustrated about the fact that she was about to make herself look like an idiot, Clara pointed at a tool that looked a bit like a pair of pliers.

"This one?" She winced at her own uncertainty.

"Close enough." Basil shrugged and casually grabbed the plier-like tool to continue working on a device that he had called a 'chronodyne generator'. She watched him use the tool to strip a few wires, which he then melted onto a contact with what she'd previously learned was a soldering iron.

As he silently worked with a scowl on his face, she felt quietly grateful that he hadn't commented on the fact that she clearly had no idea what she was doing or that she'd definitely chosen the wrong tool. She wondered what compelled him to be kind in such an odd and secretive way. From what she'd seen, he was gruff and suspicious and downright weird in his interactions with most people. She hadn't ever witnessed him go out of his way to perform any social niceties, not even once.

But somehow, he was _still_ inherently kind. He was so subtly patient about the fact that she didn't know anything about quantum physics or building circuits. He was patient without making her feel like he was actually _trying_ to be patient, as if he tried to pretend that he really wasn't doing it in the first place.

He looked up at her with a falsely aggravated frown, and Clara wondered how long it took to master that skill.

Trying to mount the finished chronodyne generator on a strange sort of tubey, hosey backpack, Basil turned to her and raised an eyebrow, asking a question without vocalizing it.

With a sense of confidence that she knew she shouldn't have, she handed him a monkey wrench.

"Brilliant!" He smiled boyishly and used the wrench to fasten a new hose onto the larger contraption.

"I think I'm getting better than you." Clara smirked, proud for having actually learned something.

At her comment, he instantly looked up from his tinkering and made intense, frowny eye contact. "Oi! Don't get ahead of yourself. It's one thing to pick the right tool, but it's another to know how to use it."

Basil then proceeded to enthusiastically wave his hands about his living room while gently hopping on the balls of his feet, explaining why hand drills were so much more important than power drills and how both of them could be utilized to build a time-gravity interface.

Clara nodded sagely and laughed at the fact that he had just as much of an ego as she did. His was just more idiosyncratic.

\---

Three days into her basic training, Clara realized that she had yet to ask either one of her two biggest questions about this supposed time travel mission.

"Why do you want a companion?"

Basil paused his hammering for a second and ruffled his wild hair, seemingly thinking of his answer. He stared earnestly at her as he spoke. "I feel like the world is mostly full of insipid and cruel and cowardly pudding brains. But I suppose I believe that among eight billion people, there are a handful that aren't any of those things. That's why I put my ad in the paper."

\---

Every afternoon that she returned to her shite hotel after spending the day doing her basic training, Danny and Adrian asked her countless questions about Basil. What was he like? What did they do all day? Was he as nutty as he seemed? What was his house like? What was their time travel plan? Who, what, when, where, why?

Clara always forgot that her whole thing with Basil was supposed to be the basis of a bullshit article, and she _hated_ it when they made her remember. She rarely gave them straight answers to their questions.

Instead, she showered in boiling hot water to wash away the guilt and the grime of the dirty, nasty thing that she was doing to the only person she'd ever met that pulsed so intensely with spirited, colorful life. In her gray existence, he was so vividly and wonderfully different.

She wondered if a Coal Hill Magazine article would ever be capable of inspiring people to paint themselves in the colors of the rainbow, instead of crushing and mocking anyone who showed even the tiniest hint of a hue.

\---

"Why 2002? What happened in 2002?"

Basil didn't look up from his newest circle calculation. "This whole thing is about regret. It's about mistakes. And it's about love."

Clara knew that it wasn't a straight answer to her question, but it was more than she'd been willing to hope for.

In the ensuing silence, she watched his long fingers tug on his hair and scribble away on large pieces of paper, and she tried to imagine what it was like to see the world as he did. Maybe it was more round or more saturated or more boyish. Maybe it was just _more_.

\---

Clara was lying on her hotel bed, trying to research some nonsense about cats in boxes and attempting to understand how that had anything to do with what Basil was doing, while Adrian and Danny argued on the other bed about something she wasn't particularly interested in listening to.

Cutting off Danny's irrelevant commentary, Adrian spoke up to address them both. "So anyway, can we _please_ just focus on the article and figure out what's wrong with this guy? Like low IQ or emotional disorder or whatever?"

Clara bristled. "What makes you think there's something wrong with him?"

Danny answered automatically, with absolute certainty and no hesitation. "He thinks he can go back in time."

Something cold and bitter settled in the pit of her stomach at hearing her coworkers talk about Basil like he was some irrelevant madman, not worth their consideration or their time of day. Nothing more than a moderately stimulating subject for an inconsequential article.

"Was there something wrong with Einstein or David Bowie?" Her voice was stiff.

"Not the same," Danny instantly replied, and she felt herself snap just a little.

"Just because this man is trying to do something new, doesn't mean he's a bloody freak show."

"So you think this is _normal?_ "

Before she could form her reply, Clara was cut off by the sound of her ringtone. Not bothering to give either of her coworkers a spare glance, she grabbed her stuff and left the room as she answered the phone, ready to meet her caller in his shitty blue car that was now just down the street.


	4. Chapter 4

As Clara felt panic and regret flood her veins, she asked herself what in the world she'd done in her life to land herself in her current position.

"Whaaat am I _doing_?" She looked down at the clipboard in her hands and tried to make sense of the situation.

Once she'd gotten in Basil's car after leaving her hotel, he'd driven them to a questionable car park just outside of Hastings to pick up one of those shady-looking white vans that everybody broadly associated with degeneracy. Half an hour after that, at about 9:30pm, they'd arrived back in town and she'd gazed out the windshield to see none other than "Karabraxos Laser Technologies" looming in front of them.

That was when things officially became legally dubious.

He'd told her that the building contained some elaborate technology that he needed to complete the machine that would take them on their journey, and Clara had wasted a split second in being proud of herself for having known that he really had been casing the place out when she'd been following him all those days ago. Then, he'd handed her a clipboard, saying something about breaching a perimeter and locating some package and meeting him at some pre-established rendezvous point of which she had absolutely no knowledge, and had left her in the van as he’d crept towards the building wearing his trademark sunglasses.

So, Clara supposed, her present position was very much of her own making. That did not make it any less surreal.

After a few minutes of sitting there in an unfocused panic, Clara flipped through the clipboard and finally found the page that mentioned the rendezvous point. Deciding that she was already too deep into this mess, she took a stabilizing breath and fumbled from the passenger seat into the driver's seat, shifting the van back into drive.

It took her a few minutes to find the right garage in the large industrial complex, but once she found it, she backed in (as instructed on the clipboard) and let herself imagine what it might be like to be James Bond resisting arrest at a laser tech company on a Thursday night in Hastings.

She'd been halfway through punching and knocking out all of the angry policemen in her imagination, when she'd heard the van's back doors swing open.

She whipped her head around as her heart jumped into her throat, and calmed only slightly when she saw that the intruder was Basil loading boxes and boxes of things labeled 'please handle with care' into the van.

"Oi. Oi! What is all that stuff?"

"They're lasers and some specialized refractory lenses." Clara saw some redheaded lady start to creep up behind them just as Basil said: "This mission has been compromised, drive!"

Hands trembling, Clara threw the van into drive and took off in the direction that had been specified in the clipboard's final page.

Basil directed her for the last two minutes of the drive, and eventually, they'd ended up back at the abandoned car park where they'd picked up the van. She was shaking as she got out of the driver's seat and watched as Basil loaded the freshly stolen boxes into his own car.

He handed her his trusty Philips-head screwdriver. "Take this. It will make you feel better."

Clara held the royal blue handle of the screwdriver so tightly in her hand that she was certain she'd have its brand imprinted into her palm.

Once all of the boxes had been transferred, Basil and Clara hopped into his car, and he took off driving through Hasting's back roads to try to get back to his house. A few minutes into the drive, they came upon some road construction, and Basil instantly threw his car into reverse, frantically yelling something about having to get off of the road and about government employees and about the fact that they might connect his car to the stolen van.

"We have to wait it out, Clara. These pudding brains that are watching me, they're on high alert. I can't be connected to Karabraxos." He pulled into an unused, back-alley space between two tiny shops and killed his car's engine.

He was frowning spectacularly and shaking his head in apparent frustration.

"Basil, it's okay." Clara reached out to lay her hand on his shoulder, but he flinched and stiffened the second her hand landed on his coat, so she pulled back.

They sat in tense silence for a minute before he quietly spoke. "It's just. It's a woman, alright? My reason for going back. It's a woman."

"Who was she?"

"She was my first, er, partner. We met when we were working together at a restaurant. She was just so captivating. She was wild and she was bold and she had a huge head of curly hair. After work, while everyone was getting ready to go out, she would stick around and talk to me, teasing me for my hair and my trousers and my fascination with time travel." She watched him gaze out the windshield with a faraway, sad look in his eye. He bit the pad of his thumb as he let his head tip forward.

"What happened to her?"

"Some massive prat got drunk in a van and crashed into her living room." He took a deep breath and looked up at her. "People say there are other women out there. But it's not just about a woman. It's about a time and a place." He paused as she continued staring at him. "Do you have a favorite song?"

Clara was a bit confused by his sudden change of topic, but she decided to just follow his lead. "Yes. It's kind of daft, I guess."

In her mind's eye, she could see herself riding around Blackpool in a silver car with her mum, the bright spring sun shining in through the open windows while the still-chilly air chapped her cheeks. She remembered her mum trying to make her laugh by singing Beatles songs and dancing and smiling brighter than the sun itself.

"It's 'Here Comes the Sun'," she admitted.

Basil stared earnestly at her. "That's a good song." He paused. "It's that time and that place and that song. You remember what it was like when you were in that place and that time, and then you listen to that song, and you know that you're not in that place anymore, and it just makes you feel hollow."

Clara realized then that Basil hurt more than she'd ever taken the time to notice. When he'd said that time travel was about regret and mistakes and love, she'd never considered that it was like this. She felt something tighten in her chest as something within her tied itself to him.

"I like your reason for going back," she said, because apologizing for someone else's grief never alleviated the pain. "It's nice."

He only looked at her and nodded with a sad smile on his face.

They ended up falling asleep in his car, waiting for the safety of a proper laser-heist getaway.

\---

Early the next morning, he'd driven her back to the hotel, and they sat in his car, silently looking at the ocean that was just visible beyond the pier.

"I'm going back to stop my mother from dying when I was sixteen." Clara's admission tore through the soft blanket of peaceful silence that had settled over them. She'd felt that thing in her chest urging her to speak, to share something genuine with someone for the first time since she was a kid.

He looked at her with an understanding that made her want to scream and cry and hit something. "How did she die?"

"She was killed by some bloke. Some random bloke at a petrol station just took her and killed her." The lies made her feel like she might be able to regain control over the ugly, gnawing thing that had been sitting at her core since she was sixteen.

Basil looked pained by what she said, but didn't say anything else—like he couldn't figure out how to shape the proper acknowledgment for a death that was so random and so violent.

Clara felt something in her break at seeing him hurt for her over some story that wasn't even true. She struggled with herself as she turned to look straight into his blue eyes, begging him to understand her. "Well, no, actually," she sighed. "She was driving back to our house. It was really late, and she called me to tell me that she was coming home, and I—" Clara swallowed past the thing that usually stopped her from admitting the truth. "I asked her to stop to buy us some milk. Because I had to have milk for my tea."

He just barely nodded as he sat perfectly still, focusing his blue-green eyes on nothing but her.

"About five minutes later," she continued, "she called me to tell me that she'd gotten the milk and was coming home again. And her voice was just _so_ excited, like she was _really_ happy. And I wasn't even nice." She sighed. "That was the last time I talked to her."

Basil's eyes shone with a sorrow and a grief that resonated with the one that took up residence in her very bones. "It's not your fault, Clara."

That ugly, dark beast that sat at her core rebelled against his words, blaming her for what she'd done as the selfish person that she was. "That's what they tell me."

He looked like he intimately comprehended exactly what she was feeling, and it made her body feel momentarily less heavy.

They sat in his car, staring out at the beach for an indeterminate amount of time, allowing themselves to exist in that weird liminal space created by that early morning hour when the whole world was still asleep, and the lights were hazy, and the silence settled around them like a comforting quilt.

"I like your reason for going back, too."

\---

"Fucking lasers?" Danny spoke with a mouthful of muesli, and Clara tried to remember if she'd ever seen something as distasteful as half-chewed, soggy oats mushing around in someone else's mouth.

"What kind of lasers?" Adrian delicately picked at a blueberry muffin.

Clara shrugged as she meticulously cleaned an apple. "How should I know? I'm not a stormtrooper."

"This bloke is a full on nutter. He's over there right now thinking he's actually building a bloody time machine to save his tragic girlfriend." Danny laughed as if he'd said something funny. "Adrian, what are the chances that he can do that with these lasers?"

"How would I—"

Clara cut him off. "He doesn't know. He's not a stormtrooper either."

Adrian sighed in weary frustration. "Stormtroopers don't know anything about lasers or time travel. They're blue collar workers."

Danny tapped his fist on their shitty hotel breakfast table. "I've got to see this."

\---

Creeping around Basil's shed with Danny and Adrian made Clara's skin crawl. It felt so utterly wrong to be sneaking around the property that contained Basil's entire private universe, especially when she'd been honestly invited inside of it herself. It felt like a massive betrayal of trust.

She tried to get her coworkers to stop their little reconnaissance mission while she walked alongside them in the yard's majorly overgrown grass. "Er, should we be doing this? Isn't this like violating his privacy?"

She hated herself for not being more assertive in her weak attempt to be a better person towards Basil.

"Don't worry about it." Seeing that the door was padlocked, Danny wandered around the side of the shed and tried to peak in through the cracks between the wall's wooden slats. "I can't really see much in there. It looks like a massive engine. And a phone box."

She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of a door closing. From their hidden spot by the shed, Clara and her coworkers watched as Basil loaded a box of miscellaneous equipment into his car and drove away from his house.

Then, all three of them turned to look behind them at the sound of a loud whistle.

"Who's this tosser?" Danny asked as they all looked towards the short, round, bald man who was now signaling towards a tall, slim, blonde lady in a suit and a trench coat.

As the two strangers climbed into a nondescript black car, it suddenly dawned on Clara. "Oh my god, there are people following him. There are _really_ people following him!"

Danny nodded to both of them and said: "Alright. We're doing this."

He waved them all towards the company car, and they all rushed inside to try to keep up with both Basil and the questionable people following him.

They trailed the black car that was following Basil's blue car for about five minutes when, all of a sudden, the cars in front of them picked up speed. Danny stepped on the gas to keep up until they approached an intersection, where they all saw Basil do a quick and sharp U-turn. Evidently, he'd noticed that he was being followed.

As his blue car approached them on the road, headed in the opposite direction, Danny and Clara both ducked at the same time, trying to avoid being spotted. Driving past the black vehicle that had been following Basil, Clara looked in through their windows to see two people dressed in nearly identical, nondescript black suits and very similar beige trench coats.

"Did you see those guys?" Clara's heart was beating loudly in her chest as she tried to make sense of everything that had happened in the last twenty minutes.

"They looked like government agents or something," replied Adrian in shock from the back seat.

"He's really being followed," Clara softly admitted to herself, hating the fact that she felt something similar to relief at having learned that Basil wasn't some unstable paranoid.

Her phone started ringing, and Danny pulled over to let her out of the car so that she could answer. It was Basil.

"Hello?"

"I can't talk right now, but just watch your back, alright? Go to the beach by your hotel, I'll pick you up." He sounded rushed, but he paused for a second. "It's almost time, Clara."

Then, he hung up.

Clara looked down at her phone and felt her fingers tingling with adrenaline. She still couldn't process what she'd just seen. Who were those people that were following Basil around? Maybe he wasn't really a total madman. Maybe he was actually doing something, and people had taken notice.

She was excited and scared and confused. She couldn't quite fathom the fact that this one man had taken her drab, cubicle-bound life and transformed it into this ludicrous adventure that lived up to her wildest, most far-fetched daydreams. She felt a strange sense of pride in him for doing something so totally madcap and fantastical with so much honest belief and passion that it actually turned science fiction into a real possibility.

She turned around to get back in the car, ready to tell Danny that she needed to head towards the beach, when she was faced with that very coworker standing behind her with his arms crossed. She frowned when she noticed that he was looking at her with some odd mix of morbid curiosity and mocking pity.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I don't know, Clara. Do you have a thing for this guy?" He looked at her like he thought that the very idea was absurd and _fascinating_ and almost funny.

She bristled. "What? No."

"Can I ask you a question, then? As a reporter?"

"What?"

"What is it that you two do when you're off alone?" Danny looked so smug right in that moment, like he'd uncovered some grand secret or illicit affair.

Clara got angry. "I'm getting information, Danny, which is certainly more than what you're doing. Now, take me to the beach. I have to meet him."

Without another word, she got in the car, and they drove off. She hated the taste that was left in her mouth at having reduced her time with Basil to nothing more than gathering information.

\---

"I'm not certain what entity these pudding brains who are following me represent, but their presence here definitely accelerates the plan." Basil handed her a slim, red tin tied with blue ribbon as they sat in his car in the parking lot behind the local Tesco. "They might have people posted at every entrance of the building, but I don't think anyone knows who you are yet. You should be safe."

Clara nodded and walked in through the employee entrance, looking for the one person that Basil had described in great detail. She was meant to deliver this small tin to Bill, and she found the girl doing some sort of inventory check near the back corner of the stock room.

"Bill?" The girl looked up from whatever she was doing and gave her a friendly smile as she approached. "I'm supposed to give this to you. It's from Basil."

Clara handed Bill the red tin and watched as she untied the blue ribbon, gently lifting the box's lid. Billed looked up with quiet surprise etched into her features. "Basil said to give this to _me_?"

Clara nodded. Inside the relatively small box, she'd seen a single photograph and what must have been several thousand pounds.

"My mum, she's—" Bill sounded slightly choked up. "You tell him. You tell him that I hope he gets wherever he's going and that it all works out like he wants."

She nodded. "I will."

She walked back out to the car and tried to pin down the reason why someone would choose to be kind in the strangest, most beautiful, most complicated ways. Basil had specifically asked her not to look inside the tin, and Clara marveled at his insistence on seeming like he was nothing but a madman who had no inherent kindness tied up in who he was. She wondered why he chose to be this tenderhearted in secret and why she was so drawn to someone who was soft and warm down to their core but who didn't present that in any way that wasn't as intentionally obtuse as never asking for milk in his tea.

As she climbed back into the car, she looked into his lined face, with his kind eyes and his funny nose and his sad mouth, and she thought that she'd never seen anyone so wholly lovely in her life.

He frowned in confusion at her earnest appraisal, a crease forming between his crazy owl eyebrows. "What?"

She looked at his familiar scowl and felt herself softly smiling. "Nothing."


	5. Chapter 5

She was following Basil around in the forest, taking in all of the leaves and the random flowers and his wild hair, when they came upon an ancient, rusted truck that was covered in moss.

"If I show you something, do you promise never to tell anyone else about it? Ever?" Basil was holding the rusty truck's door handle, seriously awaiting her response.

"Yeah, of course."

She felt herself wanting to smile, but she spoke as seriously as she could. Basil opened the truck door and leaned inside to grab what looked like a very old, slightly rusted first aid kit.

"When we travel back in time, if anything bad happens—if you get hurt or if I get caught or whatever—put a note inside this tin. If anything goes wrong, we can go back to fix it." He nervously paused before opening its lid and sighed with relief as he showed her its completely empty interior. "So far, so good."

She felt herself frown slightly in confusion. "Wait. So that tin has been here since 2002? How would you know that?"

Basil put the metal box back inside the truck as he responded. "This whole thing has been here since I was a wee lad. I used to camp in this area over the summer when my family left Scotland on holiday. I used to bring all my action figures up here. I'd place them in the tin and then take them out at night and then put them back in the morning." He scratched at the back of his head as if he'd only just realized that his admission was actually an embarrassing thing to say. "Anyway."

Clara felt herself smiling. "I wish I could see you when you were a little kid."

He frowned, but the corners of his mouth and the playfulness in his eyes betrayed his contentment. "I was not as impressive as I am now, I can assure you."

Clara laughed at his absurd response, and Basil smiled brightly at her.

"Would you like to see something cool?" He tipped his head to their right.

"Always."

They wandered off into the forest, and Basil took the lead as he told Clara about the importance of learning and understanding his preferred form of encryption so that they could secretly communicate through that rusted metal box in the middle of the woods. She tried listening to what he was saying, but mostly Clara focused on the feeling of the soggy earth beneath her trainers and the sense of contentment that was starting to make a much more regular appearance in her life as a noticeable lightness in her body and a tingling in her fingers.

She tried to sense and map that thing inside of her that tied her to Basil, and she noted that it had only grown stronger and more complicated in her chest, taking over everything in the same way that the forest currently surrounding them had taken over Basil's house.

\---

They'd spent the day trekking through the woods until they came upon a clearing that Basil evidently used as a campsite often enough to leave some things around.

The sun had begun its final descent into the horizon when Basil asked her to help him make sure that his semi-permanent tent was clear of bugs and holes and anything else that was undesired. As he dove inside the tent to clear it of any unwanted insects, Clara walked around its exterior and noticed that the tent had already been patched over in several places. She wondered when he'd learned to just fix everything by himself, or if he'd been that way since he was an action-figure-toting little boy.

Once the sun had fully set, Basil moved about, muttering to himself and frowning as he tried to spark a flame, and Clara tried her best not to laugh at the ridiculous image that had popped into her head of him running about with his coattails on fire. He ran funnily enough as it was, and she couldn't really imagine how his limbs would flail if any part of him had caught a flame.

Eventually, Clara found herself sitting in front of a roaring campfire, watching as small embers sparked from the flames and flitted up towards the clear night sky.

"Are you warm enough?"

Before Basil had succeeded in building their fire, he'd handed her an old, holey jumper to wear over her own in an attempt to keep her warm. It was early-October now, and the air was bitey and cold at night.

"Yeah," she said as she nodded, but he took off into the tent and brought back a tartan blanket to give to her anyway. She ignored the way that his long fingers delicately positioned the blanket around her shoulders, as if he knew there were some optimal way to wear it for maximum heat retention.

She mumbled a thanks as she let her eyes hop from object to object in an attempt to steer clear of meeting his own. Inevitably, her gaze landed on the inside of the tent, which she only now realized she hadn't seen yet and which she was seeing now because he'd left the tent flap open.

"What is that? Is that a guitar?" That was positively the last thing that she'd expected to see out here. She honestly felt that it was more likely to find a weird sonic machine than a bloody guitar. Before he even responded, she stood up, grabbed it from the tent, and brought it back to the fire.

He gently accepted the instrument from her hands.

"Can you play it?"

"Not really very well," he answered sheepishly. Clara blinked hard at his response and wondered if that was the first time she'd ever heard him admit that he wasn't good at something. "My dad used to play. He was very good. I always liked the music, so I tried to learn."

"Would you play it? Please?"

He hesitated for a second before nodding, and she felt so insanely lucky that he trusted her enough to allow her to see him doing something that he openly admitted he wasn't good at. She wasn't entirely convinced that she deserved that level of trust.

She watched as his large hands tenderly cradled the worn wood of the instrument, and felt something in her burn brighter than embers as he hesitantly strummed its strings, refusing to look at her. He sang some song that she'd never heard before, something she suspected he'd written himself.

He only looked up and met her chocolate brown eyes when he sang one line in particular— _Maybe I'm wrong and all that you get is what you see, but maybe I'm right and there's something out there to believe._

She didn't think that she'd ever wanted anything in her life more than she wanted time travel to be real right in that moment, if only to keep this infuriatingly confident and passionately hopeful man from becoming just as hollow and colorless as everyone else.

He quietly petered out once he'd finished the song and didn't look up from his fingers. Clara surprised herself when she realized that she wanted to hold them.

"That was so good," she spoke softly.

He looked up with a frown. "Shut up."

She knew that he was only deflecting, trying to hide from the imminent danger of vulnerability. "Thank you."

She saw him smile softly to himself and watched as he stood from their shared sitting spot to approach the fire. He bent down and picked up a small, unburnt log that he'd placed just outside of the fire's ring and brought it back to where she was sitting.

When he sat back down, she felt her cheeks warm as he let his eyes wander intensely from her mouth to her nose to her eyes. "Trust me."

Clara, confused by his sudden request, only vaguely nodded.

Slowly, as if not to startle her, Basil reached out to grab the hem of the jumper that he'd let her borrow, and she felt her heart beat hard against her ribcage. She watched his weathered hands as they delicately lifted the fabric and carefully placed the fire-warmed log against her own jumper that lay underneath. She flicked her eyes up to look into his face and studied the way that he pursed his lips and furrowed his brow as he focused on carefully arranging his holey jumper snugly over the warm log.

"That should keep you warm." His mouth settled into a small, satisfied smile, and the crease between his eyebrows eased.

As his hands absently fiddled with her clothing, she shifted her eyes ever so slightly to meet his own and felt that new and vibrant thing inside of her—that complicated thing that tied her to him and filled her up with _life_ —urge her to do something.

She felt him gasp against her mouth as she leaned forward to kiss him, and some unexplainably bright color took root in her chest when she felt his lips so hesitantly kiss her back. She smiled against his tender mouth and placed her hand against his jaw, breathing him in as his hands clenched in the fabric of her borrowed jumper.

Lightly, she tugged on his jaw with her hand, and he met her halfway with a kiss that was gentle and passionate at once, a kiss that poured all of the colors of the universe into her body and her mind and her soul. After a moment, she pulled away, resting her forehead against his, focusing on the way he was breathing.

Hesitating for only a split second, he lifted one of his hands and softly cradled her face, kissing her one last time with glee and tenderness and everything else that Basil was.

Afterwards, she tangled their fingers together, and he taught her a bit about the constellations and about how to make the best paper airplanes. He gave her a map marked with the locations of the rusted truck and the secret campsite and told her that she didn't have to be lost anymore. She took his guitar and forced him to teach her how to play, and he grumbled about the fact that her hands were too small while trying to teach her the basics anyway, gently moving her fingers over the frets and smiling when she got something right.

They went to sleep in the tent that he'd dubbed his second home, and she buried her face into his shoulder as she lay on his arm, trying to pin down what she thought he smelled like.

Right then, Basil smelled like leaves and the smoke of a campfire, and Clara wanted to laugh at herself for thinking she'd be able to smell anything other than that.

\---

As Clara approached her hotel the next morning, she found Danny waiting for her outside.

"You're past curfew," he said.

Clara ignored his stupid comment and started walking past him, still hating that he behaved like they were in some type of army squadron and he was their de-facto leader, when he called out to her again.

"You know that woman that your boyfriend was going to go back in time to save? River?"

She brushed past the boyfriend comment and simply nodded, already regretting having shared Basil's personal information with him.

"Well, she's alive and well. She lives about an hour away."

Danny's facial expression was hard to read, and nothing about those sentences made any sense to her. "Er. How? What do you mean?"

"Missy called her and set up an interview. I think your little boyfriend might be seriously deranged."

She felt herself internally panicking as she realized that an absolute shitstorm of emotions and questions was beginning to brew inside of her. How could she not have known? How could she not have looked into this? Was Danny lying? Was Missy lying? _Was Basil lying?_

She felt everything that she had thought she'd established with Basil—all the hesitant happiness and the understanding and the learning—slipping through her fingers and she frantically tried to regain control of her feelings and put a stopper to the gaping sense of loss that was tearing through her.

Her fingers were shaking as she started to ramble and lie and try to convince herself that the whole situation was just what she'd expected. "Yeah, I know, he's totally mad. He's completely barmy, I know. So she's alive? Okay. Okay. I want to do the interview."

Danny had an odd look on his face, like he was satisfied about having been right but genuinely sad about taking something from her. "That's fine."

She felt all of the brilliant colors that Basil had helped her paint and create inside of herself begin to turn gray.

\---

They pulled up outside of a lovely brownstone in Brighton, and Clara got out of the company car without looking at or speaking to her coworkers. Danny had said he'd wait just down the street in the car with Adrian, but she didn't really care.

She felt her knees wobble beneath her as she walked towards the beautiful house with the emerald green door and neatly kept garden, and her hands trembled horribly as she lifted and released the gilded knocker, waiting for the woman inside to appear and further tear her soul to shreds.

A radiant woman with a head full of bouncy, light curls opened the door, and Clara already knew that this would go poorly. They sat down in a posh living room, and she shifted uncomfortably in her chair, trying to hide the fact that her hands were shaking. River was beautiful.

"He worked at Amelia's, which was the restaurant that I waited at all throughout college, and he was really... unique. He was funny, but he was different."

Clara cleared her throat. "How long were you two together?"

River's brow bunched in confusion. "Well, we were never really _together_ together."

"You mean you never dated?" She wanted to tear her heart out and just throw it out the window. She thought that it might actually hurt less.

"I wouldn't call it dating. He wasn't the type of guy you could easily fit into your life. You know, with your friends and family." River proceeded to say something about 'that kind of guy' that she probably thought was relatable, but Clara hadn't really been listening. She felt like she was floating about outside of her own body.

She forced herself to speak. "So then what happened? Do you two still keep in touch?"

"Well I started dating John, who eventually became my husband, and Basil quit his job at the restaurant. I didn't really see him after that. Until the accident, that is."

Clara dreaded what she already knew was coming. She should have bloody known that when Basil had mentioned regret, he had meant regret for his own bloody massive mistakes. She braced herself.

"Basil drove his car into John's house. There was a big dent under the kitchen window. We decided to tell the police that it was a hit and run because Basil seemed unstable and genuinely apologetic, but I haven't seen him since." River lightly shrugged, giving her an ' _isn't that just crazy?_ ’ kind of smile, and Clara thought she could have vomited.

She finished the rest of the interview on autopilot. She was only focused on trying to keep it together, on trying to maintain her facade of absolute control and dignity. She couldn't think beyond the present moment because if she thought for _even one second_ about all of those full and lively and weird moments that she had shared with Basil and all of the empty and cold and gray moments that would now follow, she'd undoubtedly lose her mind.

River thanked her as she walked out the door, but Clara didn't say anything. She only nodded with the fakest and weakest smile she was sure she'd ever managed.

She had just started walking down the street towards the company car, wrapping her arms around herself, when a man's voice behind her stopped her in her tracks.

"Excuse me, Clara?" And as if the day couldn't get any more bloody surreal, she turned to see none other than the two shady people that had been following Basil around standing by their black car. "Could we have a moment of your time? It's nothing to be alarmed about. We just want to ask you a few questions about Basil Smith."

Before she had the chance to even attempt to focus enough to answer, Danny came up behind her. "Woah, there. We're from Coal Hill Magazine. We're just here doing a story on this bloke. We're not involved in whatever he's doing."

Clara managed to refocus right then. "What do you want from him?"

The tall, blonde woman spoke up. "He's been contacting government scientists on the internet, asking questions about our particle accelerator. We've been investigating Smith for a couple of years now, and we suspect him of being an agent."

Clara very nearly let out a hysterical laugh. Even if Basil had lied to her about River, there was absolutely no way that he could be a spy. That man was not meant for any kind of deep cover operation. Not to mention that he was suspicious of everyone, and if he were a spy, he would have had the ability to suss her out. He would have known that she'd been pulling one over on him for the sake of a stupid article from day one.

For some unfathomable reason, she still felt that nasty creature of guilt begin to claw at her when she thought about that. Why should guilt eat away at her? She'd just found out he'd been lying about his story this whole time. She shouldn't care, and she hated that she did because it meant that it was out of her control, which made her hands shake.

She tried to refocus as Danny asked about Basil's background. The short, bald one with the thick glasses was speaking.

"He was arrested in Oxford for breaking into a nuclear physics laboratory, and then there was a recent robbery of a laser research center nearby."

The tall woman cut in. "He hasn't been back to his house in the last twenty-four hours. Give us a ring if you hear from him."

She handed Danny a card, and Clara felt herself nearing some sort of breakdown.

Danny responded for them while he crossed his arms. "We will."

She still hated his 'we' bullshit.


	6. Chapter 6

After a long night of barely succeeding at pretending to sleep, Clara had decided that she needed to speak to Basil—that she just needed to _understand_. Danny had driven them to his overgrown house while Adrian had gazed out of the back-seat window, and no one had spoken a word.

Taking a deep breath as she stood on his porch by herself, Clara knocked on Basil’s chipped-paint front door. It opened on its own, like it hadn’t been properly closed, and she pushed it the rest of the way open, trying to breathe through her nerves.

“Basil? Basil, I’m coming in.”

She heard no response, no signs of him inside, and she took the opportunity to wander through the parts of his house that she’d never been in before—spaces beyond the littered living room that they’d spent so much time in.

As she wandered up the creaky stairs and took in the old, faded wallpaper and the piles of dusty, worn books and the antiquated furniture, it dawned on Clara that, in a practical sense, Basil was still largely a stranger. She didn’t even know how he’d gotten this house or how long he’d been living there or if he had any kind of family.

He had scientific equipment in almost every single room. Things she didn’t even have a name for. Things with screens, things with needle-gauges, things with different sized knobs and brightly-colored buttons and tangled wires. She asked herself what it was all for, wondering if maybe he really _was_ some sort of spy and she’d been the one that had been played for a fool after all.

Then, she stumbled upon a room with faded orange walls that were covered in both circle sketches and a whole host of clocks that somehow all displayed different times, none of them correct. A majority of the clocks ticked obnoxiously loudly, and as she let the inconstant rhythm fill her up, she realized what it was like to be surrounded by the sound of asynchronous time. She wondered if Basil always heard the passage of time like that in his head. Maybe it moved in weird shapes for him, too.

She had just started looking at the papers and the blueprints piled on the desk in the corner when he blundered in, taking her entirely by surprise. She’d been distracted by all the time.

“Clara! What are you doing here?” He rushed over to the window as he continued to speak. “Everything’s set. I moved the TARDIS to the launch site. Departure is at 4pm.” He peaked out the window through the blinds and paused, as if realizing something. “How’d you get in here, anyway? The pudding brains are all over me, I had to sneak in through the back.”

She felt herself speaking all of a sudden. “Whose house is this?” He whipped his head around to look at her and frowned in confusion. She sounded a tad unhinged. “Where are the lasers? Can you show me the lasers?”

His frown turned serious. “What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Where’s the time machine?”

“The TARDIS is at the launch site.” Basil answered her perfectly seriously, like his time machine was real, like this whole thing wasn’t all make-believe. “Clara, what are you doing?”

“I spoke to those people who are following you, you know. They told me that you stole those lasers because you’re some kind of spy.”

She saw him start smirking before she’d even finished her sentence. “That’s perfect! Let them think that. It works in our favor. Seriously.”

He turned to peak back out of the window, probably looking for the so-called ‘pudding brains’, and she realized that she’d never really cared about whether or not he was a spy. She’d only ever cared about the fact that he’d lied to her. He’d lied to her about losing someone, and she’d bared her guilt to him, and he didn’t even bother coming clean right then and there.

“I talked to River.”

Basil instantly turned to look at her with fright and dread and resignation written across every single one of his features. His body sagged. It was admission enough.

“Why weren’t you honest with me?” Her voice was weak and choked up, and she clenched her fists to try to get it under control.

She saw his throat bob as he swallowed. “I’m sorry, Clara. I did this once before and I messed it up, but it’s a complicated science, and I didn’t want—”

“ _You can’t time travel, Basil!_ ” She rubbed her hands into her face. “This is all crazy. You _lied_ to me! Okay? You lied. What else are you lying about?”

“I haven’t lied about anything else, Clara. Trust me. Please. Just… Come to the launch site at 4pm, take my hand, and you’ll see.”

She stared into his pleading eyes for a minute, recording every detail of the honest regret and the heavy self-loathing written in the lines on his face, and only then realized how terrified he was. Terrified of her and the power she wielded over him. He had come to depend on her.

She was about to respond when she heard Danny call out her name. Both of her coworkers burst into the room, looking like they’d run from the car.

“Clara! They’re right behind the house. They’re right behind me,” Danny panted.

Clara vaguely registered that he was probably talking about the government agents, but she was too focused on Basil right then and the way that his whole body had tensed the second that Danny had walked into the room.

She watched him intently as he put the pieces together and winced when he turned to look at her with a look of such painful betrayal that Clara wished she could to sink right into the floor.

“ _No_. Clara, no. _Please_ , no.” He sounded so entirely and wholly crushed that it physically ached in her core. She watched in horror as that vibrant life inside of him faded just a little. “Were you making fun of me this whole time?”

“No, I wasn’t,” she pleaded.

“Look, mate. No one here is making fun of you. We just came here to write an honest piece about you for a magazine.” Danny Pink, ever the bloody soldier, jumped in with a straightforward report.

Basil turned to look at her then, and she was certain that Danny’s final piece of information had nearly broken him. She could see the shift in his eyes, and she hated herself for it.

He turned to look back at Danny and Adrian with fury creasing his brow. “Get out of my house! Get out!” He frantically looked around the room like a cornered animal. “I’m leaving tonight. No, I’m leaving right now.”

Basil then took off running—out his front door, over his overgrown lawn, and into the forest beyond.

\---

“Oi! Guys, check this out. It’s open.” Adrian was pointing at Basil’s shed and its clearly opened padlock on the door. None of them, not even Clara, had ever properly seen the inside.

Clara had been too busy staring into the trees behind Basil’s house to notice that the door to the shed had been left open. She’d been wondering if Basil would be able to hear her if she called out to him from where she was standing. He’d only run off five minutes ago.

She turned to join Adrian and Danny, deciding that she didn’t have it in her to scream, and the three of them walked into the musty shed.

As Danny looked down at the large, empty space on the floor, he spoke. “I know what they were looking for, those government agents. I saw it. It was like a phone box or something. It had an engine.”

Adrian found the light switch and flipped it on. “It’s gone.”

Clara felt like she was in one of her daydreams. The walls of the shed were covered in blueprints and diagrams for something that looked too much like a phone box and for something else that looked extremely complicated. She looked at all of the circles and the calculations written in crayon and pen and marker on papers of all different colors, and she felt something building inside of her.

This strange kind of language and science that moved so naturally through Basil had started to move through her too, and she felt it tugging at her from that place inside of her chest. That complicated thing that tied them, it had something to do with this. She reached out her hands and delicately ran her fingers over his messy scrawl.

“You don’t think he actually built it, do you?” Adrian asked the question that all of them were thinking.

Clara’s fingers tingled. Her heart beat loudly in her chest. Her body felt just light enough.

_The greatest risk is not taking one._

She thought back to the beginning of all of this, to her life before Basil, to the sleek, modern office and her nonexistent relationships and the grayness of her everyday life. Even if she didn’t really know the specifics of Basil’s family tree or his precise backstory, she knew _him_ well enough that she felt like she could take a risk. She felt that she _just might_ be brave enough to do something. To follow this man who had lit up her life in vibrant shades of blue and orange and green, who had patiently taught her about wire-cutters, and who had shown her what unapologetic peculiarity looked like.

 _Time travel isn’t about fighting people, Clara! It’s about_ running _!_

So, as she felt that thing building inside of her reach its tipping point, she ran. She ran into the woods that had only just started to feel familiar, and she felt a spark of life come back to her.

As she felt the damp earth pounding beneath her feet, she thought that she might just understand what he meant by his strange proclamation. They wouldn’t fight Danny or Adrian, they wouldn’t fight the government, and they wouldn’t fight each other. They’d just run. And they’d to it together.

She had been running for five minutes when she registered that she didn’t really know where she was headed. She didn’t know where the launch site was. Frantically, Clara reached into her purse to dig out a map. Basil’s map.

_You don’t have to be lost anymore._

That night that they’d camped in the woods, he’d told her that he’d marked the locations of the truck and his ‘second home’ on the map, but some part of her just _knew_ that he would have secretly marked the launch site, too. Because he was infuriatingly obtuse and secretly kind and always bloody clever.

Just as she’d thought, he’d marked an extra location on the map with a tiny blue circle, and she smiled brightly when she spotted it. She took off with a new sense of direction and a lightness in her chest.

In her minds eye, she saw Basil running in front of her like he had when he’d first invited her to see things his way. She pictured his red-lined coat flapping behind him, his silver curls bouncing happily, his black boots thudding on the ground. She imagined that she was chasing him just like she had that first time.

Eventually, she came upon a clearing, where she spotted a big, blue phone box with a massive, complicated engine attached to its side. Basil was fiddling with some gauge on its exterior.

He looked away from what he was doing when he heard her approaching, and his eyes lit up in a sad sort of hope. She spoke before he could say anything.

“Basil, I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what to do with her shaking hands.

“Were you making a joke of me the whole time?”

“No. I promise.” As she clenched her fists, she saw his eyes momentarily flicker down before they looked into her own. “I lied about the magazine story, but everything else was true. That was really me.”

She felt his fingers gently uncurl her fists, and he took one of her hands. He was smiling in a manner that reminded her of the way that her mum used to smile way back when. It was brighter than the sun. His eyes and his nose wrinkled in pure giddy happiness, and he laughed just a little.

Clara had never heard him laugh before.

“The plan has been updated. I’m going back just for you, now.” He squeezed her fingers. “Do you trust me, Clara?”

She nodded, and he pulled her into a cramped phone box that contained nothing but two levers, one screen, a few buttons, and an array of colorful lights.

She met his brilliantly blue eyes as he tilted his head towards the levers. “Together?”

Her free hand reached up and gently cupped his face. “Together.” She pulled him down to her level, and she let herself kiss him with everything she had. She laughed with genuine mirth against his mouth as she thought about her life right in that moment.

She was surrounded by color everywhere—it was practically a living, breathing thing inside of her and Basil. She was crammed into a shoddy, glorified snog-box doing exactly what the name implied. She knew with absolute certainty that when she pulled that lever with Basil, she’d be traveling through time and space with a man who ran around with a blue, Philips-head screwdriver in his pocket at all times.

He kissed her cheek one last time before pulling away, she beamed up at him, and they pulled the levers together.

The machine around them groaned and whirred and whooshed.

It was so much better than her daydreams.

\---

_“To go at it alone or to choose a companion.” He frowned as he fiddled with his wrench, considering his next words. “When you choose a partner, you have to make compromises and sacrifices, but it’s a price you pay. Do I want to follow my every whim and fancy as I make my way through time and space? Absolutely.” He scoffed and pursed his lips. “But at the end of the day, do I need someone when I’m doubting myself or I’m being rude or my heart is failing me? Do I need someone who will always have my back?” His frown eased, and his eyes were soft._

_Clara smiled. “Well, do you?”_

_“Yes. I do.”_


End file.
